Copyright The Boston Globe
In recounting her parents’ story, Birch said she was trying to deliver a simple message to the football players: Kindness is powerful, and hate never accomplished anything good. Birch said the Smithfield football players didn’t ask her a single question, although her presentations often prompt many. And she said she was disappointed to hear that the five players involved in the hazing have now been reinstated to the football team. Birch, 76, a retired math teacher who lives in Pawtucket, said she spoke to about 50 members of the varsity and junior varsity football teams at Smithfield High School on Oct. 21. Her presentation came soon after Superintendent Dawn Bartz announced that “several” football players were barred from participating in the rest of the season after a probe into “hazing and antisemitic behavior” confirmed “inappropriate conduct.” Bartz said the district was partnering with the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center to provide training and education “focused on respect and inclusion.” But the day after Birch’s presentation, the five senior football players involved in the incident were back on the team, according to Adam Greenman, president and CEO of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island. Greenman said alliance officials spoke to the victim and others connected to the incident, and they’ve been told that five senior football players locked a Jewish freshman football player in the bathroom and sprayed Lysol through a grate in the door while yelling antisemitic slurs at him. Bartz has not publicly explained why the season-long suspension was rescinded. In an interview, Birch said allowing the football players to return to the team “sends a terrible message.” “It says, ‘It’s OK to hate, it’s OK to bully, it’s OK to pick on helpless people,’” she said. “It’s a horrible message. And you can get away with it?” Birch noted that the Smithfield incident comes amid a spike in antisemitism. “We’re living in a climate right now where hatred is OK — say any rotten thing you feel like and it’s alright," she said. “And it isn’t alright.” Birch said she told the Smithfield football players about how her mother was experimented on by Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed medical experiments at the Auschwitz death camps. She said Mengele, dubbed “The Angel of Death,” experimented on her mother as he tried to find a way to sterilize young Jewish women. “She was told that she would never, ever be able to have kids,” Birch said. “So I am her miracle.” Birch said she has been telling her parents’ story at schools and churches since she retired from Mount Pleasant High School in 2009. Usually, groups she speaks to want to know more, but none of the Smithfield football players asked her anything, she said. “Two days later, I spoke in New Bedford, and I had a gazillion questions,” she said. Of the 50 Smithfield players she addressed, Birch said three did come up to her afterward and shook her hand. But she said she usually sees emotion when she talks about her parents, and she didn’t see any in the faces of the players. Birch said she concluded that the players “were forced to be there — they didn’t want to be there." Wendy L. Joering, executive director of the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center in Providence, said that after the hazing incident, she and her colleagues met on Oct. 16 with Bartz, athletic director Glenn Castiglia, and Smithfield High School Principal Kristin M. Ward at the superintendent’s office. “(Bartz) said she welcomes us coming in and doing programming,” Joering said. “She said a culture change was really needed.” Joering said she presented the school officials with a year-long plan to work on that culture change. “We were very clear this was not punishment,” she said. “We wanted to work with them to help them educate through the lens of the Holocaust to promote dignity, to combat antisemitism, and to confront all forms of hate.” The plan was to have all students in the school hear from the children of Holocaust survivors, and to work more intensively with the five players involved in the incident, as well as the bystanders, she said. The plan also was to include presentations by survivors of the Armenian and Cambodian genocides, she said. As a first step, Birch spoke to the varsity and junior varsity football teams, Joering said. After Birch spoke, the principal told the other players to go to practice, while the five players involved in the incident stayed a bit longer, she said. Joering said she told the players, “Good people can make stupid mistakes.” But she told them the goal is to educate the players and convey to them that they have an opportunity to learn from this and “pay it forward” – to be an “upstander,” meaning someone who intervenes on behalf of a person being attacked or bullied. The players were given the book “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman that depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The players also received a worksheet. Joering said Bartz then told the players that the book and worksheet would be part of their “community service.” But Joering said she made clear that “nothing we do is community service.” Joering concluded by telling the five players that they would be paired with families of Holocaust survivors and meet with them over the next several weeks. But the next day, Oct. 22, Joering found out that the five players were back on the team. When she and the Jewish Alliance called Bartz, she would not answer any questions about the players or explain why they had been reinstated, she said. “I was shocked,” Joering said. “This is one of the strangest things I have ever experienced in my professional career.” She said she has to assume Bartz came under pressure to reverse her decision. The Smithfield School Committee has said it is considering “a thorough review of the administrative response” to the incident. Joering said, “I hope the school committee will work with us and we will provide the education that is really needed.” Smithfield police Detective Captain Cory Carpenter said there is a report “pending” about the hazing incident, but he said it was not complete or available for release as of Thursday afternoon.
